Broken Pieces
by Lukrezia Dawn
Summary: After Damon's death Elena is thrown completely off the rocker. The people she loves keep leaving her she can't take it anymore. But Elijah is there to keep her upright and help take some of the pain away. When he takes her away from Mystic Falls and the memories of all she's lost Elena opens her eyes to him as a man and not merely a friend and protector anymore. Please R


**Broken Pieces**

_Prologue_

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When they reach the cave where Damon and Bonnie had tricked Klaus to, everything is already over. Klaus is lying on the cave floor, a dagger protruding from his chest, clearly incapacitated and Bonnie is hunched in the corner, holding Damon's unresponsive body in her trembling arms, tearfully begging him to wake up. For a minute everyone is still, no one dares to intrude upon that moment before Stefan's gasp tears through the silence and shatters the illusion.

Then Rebekah is running to Klaus and kneeling by him as if checking if he really is dead as he seems, but making no move to remove the dagger. Elijah joins her soon after, his hard gaze unflinching as he stares at his brother. Retribution, he thinks, for all the times Klaus had daggered each of them.

Stefan is kneeling by his brother and Bonnie, hands shaking as he frames Damon's face and calls his name, but the older vampire is unresponsive, his blue eyes staring at the cave ceiling, mouth set in a hard line. The weeks he and Bonnie had spent looking for that particular flower that only blooms on a full moon every ten years and whose ashes combined with the white oak ashes and dagger can take out Klaus, accumulated to this moment. Here still the truth remains, a vampire who kills an Original dies with him. Damon is gone. Forever.

Caroline holds Stefan close as he cries and cries and clutches Damon's dark shirt in his fists, begging his older brother to come back, but Damon remains deaf to his pleas. Bonnie is inconsolable, still holding the dark-haired vampire in her lap, stroking his face, bathing it with her tears. Elena still stands in the mouth of the cave, taking in the scene as if none of that is real and she's merely a spectator to something that means nothing to her. First when Elijah moves to pick up Damon and Stefan cries out to leave his brother alone, Elena wakes up and realizes what had happened.

Damon is dead. The thought hits her out of nowhere and she rushes inside with vampire speed coming to a halt beside Bonnie and unceremoniously falls to her knees, hands running all over Damon's torso, softly whispering his name. There is no response, no fluttering of recognition in those crystalline blue eyes, no smirk is coming to those perfect lips. For once Damon is not moving towards her and he never will again.

Just like that the walls she's built around herself shatter in a million pieces and the emotions she's worked so hard to keep locked up spill out and overwhelm her. Love for this man paralyzes her as does the grief when she thinks that he's not coming back. Damon is gone for good and she's not had a chance to tell him she loves him again. She'd preferred to close her emotion off to enjoying every moment with Damon as if it were their last and now there would never be any moment with Damon again. She'll never kiss him again, never hold him, never feel his arms around her, his hands on her face, and never hear him say how much he loves her again.

The cry that tears itself from her mouth at that moment is so full of pain and loss that everyone is the cave shudders and cringes. Even Rebekah bites her lip to keep tears at bay. Stefan crumbles in a heap and sobs, Caroline cries in his back, Bonnie hugs Elena close as they weep together and the only thing Elijah can do is wrap a supporting arm around the anguished brunette and prey that the pain won't take her to her lover when the first shock subsides. His brother is dead, yes, but the moment the dagger left Niklaus' chest he will wake up again, but Damon would stay lost to them forever. With a defeated sigh, the eldest Original scoops Elena in his arms and carries her out into the night, Rebekah follows after him dragging Niklaus along the ground while Stefan and Caroline share Damon's weight between them and Bonnie slowly exits the place of their last showdown with the monster that had almost destroyed them all.

In the end they were victorious, but at what price?

Dimly Bonnie wondered what will happen to all of them should another strong enemy appear. As much as she's hated Damon for his past sins, even she knew that in the end everyone relied on the blue-eyed vampire and his love for Elena to save them. Stefan liked to play the hero but his plans never quite worked out the way he wanted them to and in the end it had been Damon who'd found a way to get rid of Klaus without offing the Original Hybrid's entire bloodline with him. Daggering killed an Original without endangering their bloodline and that was why Damon had focused on finding a way to do that to Klaus. He'd succeeded in finding out about the moon flower, locating the flower, escaping the hordes of werewolves that guarded it and finally gleefully ramming the spelled dagger through Klaus' heart. If anyone woke Klaus up in their lifetimes they would have a revenge driven Hybrid on their hands and their strongest protector wouldn't be there anymore.

It really hadn't been Damon's brightest idea, Bonnie concluded and cried some more.

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**My very first story, please be gentle with me. It follows canon up to Jeremy's death and Elena turning off her feelings. This will be Elijah/Elena because I love Elijah and they could be great together. Please review.**

**Lukrezia**


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